Nikolay Cherkasov

He was born in Saint Petersburg (later Petrograd in 1914, and Leningrad from 1924 to 1991) into the family of a railway clerk. From 1919 he was a mime artist in Petrograd's Maryinsky Theatre, the Bolshoi Theatre, and elsewhere. After graduating from the Institute of Stage Arts in 1926, he began acting in the Young Spectator's Theatre in Leningrad.

Cherkasov debuted in film with the supporting part of hairdresser Charles in Vladimir Gardin’s Pushkin biopic The Poet and the Tsar (1927). Cherkasov was one of Stalin's favorite actors and played title roles in Sergei Eisenstein's monumental sound films Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Parts I & II of Ivan the Terrible (1945 & 1946; though Part II was not officially released until 1958 for political reasons). He also played Jacques Paganel in the memorable 1936 adaptation of Jules Verne's The Children of Captain Grant. In the 1947 comedy Springtime Cherkasov appeared alongside other icons of Stalinist cinema, Lyubov Orlova and Faina Ranevskaya. For the role of Alexander Popov in the film Alexander Popov in 1951, he received a Stalin Prize of the second degree. In 1957, Cherkasov portrayed Don Quixote in director Grigori Kozintsev's screen adaptation of the novel.

Cherkasov's grave, Tikhvin Cemetery, Saint Petersburg

In 1941, Cherkasov was awarded the Stalin Prize; in 1947, he was named a People's Artist of the USSR. He wrote his memoirs, "Notes of a Soviet Actor" in 1951. He died in Leningrad in 1966 and was buried in Tikhvin Cemetery, the "Necropolis of the Masters of Art", at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

The image of Cherkasov in the role of Alexander Nevsky is on the Soviet Order of Alexander Nevsky, because there are no known lifetime portraits of Nevsky.[2]

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